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Chapter five
Titus knew that besting Abbot was a fantasy, but he nursed it like a potent drink as he made his way toward the locks leading out to the alien ship. Abbot had been playing this game for too long. But on the other hand, there was something to be said for youth, flexibility, and desperation. Not Inea. He’s not going to get Inea.
He had to think. In the day he’d been at the station, Titus had spent no more than four hours in his room. In six hours, he had to be back at the lab, and then they’d be after him for his physical and to log time in the gym. For all he knew, that might be as necessary for his kind as for humans, in order to return to Earth with any bone left.
If he went to the alien craft now, someone might notice that he never rested. They wouldn’t make anything of it immediately. Everyone here was an eager volunteer. But dedication was one thing, superhuman performance something else. So he didn’t dare approach the alien craft openly.
He loitered at an intersection until the corridor was clear, then cloaked himself with Influence. He’d found that surveillance cameras were located only where emergency crowd control was needed. He evaded them and found the locker room, where there was a locker with his name on it containing a customized spacesuit. He waited until the room was empty, then suited up in haste, using Influence to repel anyone from the door. Abbot could suit up in plain sight of half a dozen people and keep them from noticing! thought Titus, ruing his own lack of practice.
Thought of Abbot’s mastery of Influence reminded him that he’d have to find some way of keeping the Tourist out of the lab and away from Inea. Just throwing him out of the lab in a fury as he’d done earlier wouldn’t be enough. He’d have to work on Colby somehow, get it made an order.
Dressed, Titus tagged along with a group going on shift. There were three engineers, two electricians, a physicist, a chemist, and a metallurgist. Their chatter was strewn with references to the alien craft’s design. But one thing was clear: not a tenth of what they had been doing and thinking had yet been reported on Earth, even at top security levels.
Furthermore, nobody yet understood the craft’s engines or power source. Speculation was ru
“I tell you, that thing has to be FTL. It works on some principle we’ve never imagined. There’s no power source!”
“Look, maybe it lost its sails. Maybe it’s not supposed to come this close to a star. Maybe they left their engines out beyond Neptune. That could be why we can’t analyze the propulsion-because this module doesn’t have any!”
“Maybe this is only a lifeboat detached from a larger ship that suffered a disaster.” The third engineer was the youngest. She was also the smallest of the group, dark-haired and comely, with a musical voice. “We can’t rule anything out, even though we wouldn’t build a lifeboat with such a huge cargo bay.”
“If it’s a lifeboat,” argued the first engineer, “it would have Propulsion and power for life-support and communications. Maybe it’s just a cargo ”crane`?“
One of the others spoke up. “You know, I think you’ve got there-a power module left way out in solar orbit. Makes sense. The ship didn’t explode on impact. It could be they came in on battery power. We ought to get one of the observatories searching far orbits tangent to the ship’s line of approach. Might find their sails.”
“It can’t be a new idea,” said someone else. “I’ll bet they’re doing a search already.”
“And what if they aren’t? I’m going to write it into my daily report, and we’ll see what happens. That’s what they want us to do, you know-think independently so if we all come to the same conclusions, they’ll figure we got it.”
Titus didn’t know if a module of this ship was missing, but according to Abbot, the ship their ancestors had come to Earth in had been faster than light, and it hadn’t exploded on impact, either. Titus had always accepted that some mishap had forced that ship down on Earth, but he’d often wondered where they had been going and why. Had they been explorers, colonists, traders, or even tourists? Was this new ship of the same sort, or different?
“There’s our ride,” called one of the men.
The docking bay’s pressure doors stood open, and now a truck churned silently up onto the glazed flooring of the bay. It was an open framework built over two tracks, and it maneuvered quite nimbly though soundlessly in the vacuum.
Titus felt the vibration as the truck scraped the dock. He followed the others, climbing onto the struts and grabbing a cargo strap. The driver was seated on a bench before an array of levers which she manipulated with finesse. “All set?” Without turning to look, she added, “Here we go!”
The truck lurched away from the dock and lumbered out the door into the starry night, kicking up a cloud of dust. The sun was not visible at the moment, for which Titus was thankful. Even though his suit would protect him as nothing he could wear on Earth, he still didn’t wholly trust it. It had been designed by humans with human tolerances in mind.
But his anxieties melted away as they rounded the corner of the bay doors and came into full view of the wreck.
Pieces of it that had scattered during the crash had been dragged up beside the main fragment before the station was built around it. The main section was mangled, torn, and half-buried.
Floodlights cast sharply defined cones of illumination, stripping away any glamour or drama. The ship looked like heaps of trash in a wrecking yard. But he could see something now that he hadn’t seen in the photos taken with instruments tuned to human vision.
Suddenly mindful of the cameras perpetually aimed at the wreck, he moved to shield his suit identification as he squinted against the floodlights. He could just make out markings on the ship’s hull; dark rust against darker rust color. Had the humans missed the markings because their eyes didn’t register the distinction? It was faint to him, but his eyes were not luren eyes. They were human eyes affected by luren genes.
Perhaps to luren eyes, the markings stood out brightly. He made a mental note to Influence someone to do a spectral analysis of the whole hull. It might hold a clue to the luren eye, and thus to the luren sun.
Part of the inscription was torn away and part was buried in the moon dust. But Titus could read the script. Imagining the missing parts of letters, he transliterated it to English, trying to sound the word, for he didn’t know what it meant. Kylyd. “Kailaid?”
Possibly this was a word in a different language from that preserved among Earth’s luren. Or it might simply be a name, a word that had lost meaning eons ago.
As they approached the rent in the side of the main section being used for an entryway, Titus felt a prickly surge of excitement. Suddenly, the wreck wasn’t just a heap of twisted metal anymore. It was a starship. It had an identity, a history, a proud name, and a loyal crew.
Titus ski
Twisted and distorted though it was, the shape of the space the aliens had carved struck a deep nerve in Titus, a human nerve. This place was subtly wrong. It was alien.
Titus had traveled all over the world, and had felt the vague unease in foreign buildings, a negligible component of culture-stress syndrome. But this was different. This fairly shouted wrong!
He shuddered and ducked aside through an airlock that had been wrenched and buckled at impact. Here floodlights had been strung up since they hadn’t yet conquered the ship’s systems. The ship’s lighting, when they found it, ought to provide Titus with a vital clue to the home star.